We’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. We also looked at the Lancaster Monitorial system from the early decades of the 19th century before shifting to the Common School Movement and how it shaped U.S. Education. We talked about the one-room schoolhouse and some of the shifts it embodied. We looked at an 8th grade exam from 1895 that didn’t begin to approach the level of content expected of modern 8th graders and we’ve looked at the abuses of the Indian Boarding School system. We went back again to look at the parallel-but-very-unequal development of Black schools in the U.S. between the Civil War and Brown v. Board and we took a look at an 8th grade exam from 1912. In Part 1, we looked at the European roots of Kindergarten. Today we’ll look at how Kindergarten flourished in the U.S.
German Kindergarten in Frankfurt, circa 1900. The picture is entitled “Cooking Play Hour.” Image in the public domain.
Kindergarten in the U.S. was a distinctly immigrant, and distinctly female, phenomenon. The concept of Kindergarten arrived with the waves of German immigrants in the early 1800s. Two students of Froebel’s opened schools based on his methods: Louisa Frankenberg* opened a school in Columbus, Ohio in 1836 and Margarethe Schurtz opened the first Kindergarten in the U.S. in 1856 in Watertown, Wisconsin. Both schools were opened in the German communities there and classes were conducted in German. Prominent educator and transcendentalist Elizabeth Peabody visited Schurtz’ school and was impressed by the maturity of the children. She went on to open the first English-language Kindergarten in Boston in 1860 with her sister, Mary Peabody Mann.** They became outspoken proponents of Kindergarten and were influential in its spread. Elizabeth Peabody wrote:
“The object of the Kindergarten is to form and open the mind of childhood, rather than to fill it. It is called Kindergarten by Froebel, for a somewhat whimsical but perfectly just reason, that it treats the little child as the wise gardener treats the plant…”
Kindergartens began popping up across the U.S., virtually all begun — and run — by women. Founding these schools gave women both agency and authority and positioned them to advocate for young children just at the time when people were beginning to understand that children might have specific needs that weren’t being met. Kindergarten training schools, also opened and run by women, instructed new teachers in Froebel’s methods and helped spread the program.
First public Kindergarten classroom in St. Louis, Missouri, circa 1873. Note the short tables and tiny benches and the cheerful pictures on the wall at child height. Image in the public domain.
Initially, Kindergartens were private institutions that required a fee to attend. It wasn’t something most working class families could afford, especially if they needed their children’s labor to survive. But as Kindergarten programs continued to spread in the latter half of the 19th century, interest in them grew. Eventually, the first public-school Kindergarten opened in 1873 in St. Louis. The reported impetus for this was that William Harris, the new superintendent, had undertaken a study of the district’s students and learned that many children attended school for only three years. This was especially true for poor children, many of whom were already roaming the streets by the age of three. Harris believed that a publicly-funded kindergarten would take “slum” children off the streets, teach them habits of cleanliness, and give them a taste for learning. What sometimes doesn’t get reported is that the study the superintendent undertook was in response to a proposal from a woman named Susan Blow. Susan Blow came from a wealthy family*** and was highly educated. Informed by her Christian faith, she became interested in education generally, but after a trip to Germany where she observed one of Froebel’s schools, she returned to St. Louis determined to begin a similar school and to advocate for young children to have access to this kind of learning. Blow approached Superintendent Harris to discuss implementing what she had learned in Germany. Because of her wealth and standing in the community, he took her proposal seriously, commissioned the study, and eventually approved the necessary funds. She became the first director of the Kindergarten and went on to be a tireless advocate for tax-supported early childhood education. She not only trained her teachers but required continuing education for them, not just in Kindergarten methodologies, but also literature, philosophy of history, and psychology. She believed strongly that educated teachers produced better teaching.^^ She trained scores of women as Kindergarten teachers, including several African-American women who went on to be instrumental and influential in establishing Kindergartens for Black children.
Haydee B. Campbell, 1903; image in the public domain.
One of these was Haydee B. Campbell, who was the first African-American woman to train under Blow and became a teacher in St. Louis’ only Black Kindergarten in 1879. Campbell went on to apply for a principal position for the Kindergarten department and achieved the highest score ever recorded on the examination administered to applicants, something that was reported in the St. Louis newspapers as a thing of wonder. In 1889, she became the Superintendent of Black Kindergartens in St. Louis and went on to train many, many Black women as Kindergarten teachers. They, in turn, established and led Black Kindergartens throughout the country. As a member of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW^^^), Campbell’s national influence was even more pronounced. In 1899, she addressed the NACW national convention in Chicago on the topic “Why the National Association of Colored Women Should Devise Means for Establishing Kindergartens.” The NACW went on to advocate for the establishment of Kindergartens for Black children and families across the country and provided the infrastructure for coordinated efforts to achieve this goal.
Blow’s program proved extremely popular. The first Kindergarten in 1873 had 68 pupils; by 1884 that number had grown to nearly 9,000 students in schools across the city and every public school in St. Louis had a Kindergarten. Kindergarten was taking off in other areas as well: by 1880, there were more than 400 Kindergartens in 30 states (though many were still private) and Kindergarten teacher training schools in every major U.S. city. By 1914, most of the major public school systems offered, though did not require, Kindergarten for 5-year-olds.
To us, these early Kindergartens would look a lot like a preschool program, with constructive play serving as the basis for all learning and a distinct emphasis on games, singing, movement, and manipulatives rather than academic instruction. Today’s kindergartens vary widely by district but – in a departure from many European Kindergarten programs which retain constructive play as their foundation — many have become more academically focused, leaving the play to Pre-K programs. It’s not hard to imagine what Froebel might say to that.
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*Frankenburg usually does not get credit for opening the first Kindergarten because when her school opened, Froebel had not yet coined the term. Potato, Potahto.
**If that sounds familiar, it should: Mary eventually married Horace Mann, the founder and advocate of the Common School Movement. They bonded over their shared ideas about how children should be educated. Elizabeth and Mary’s other sister, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, was married to the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, of Scarlet Letter fame. It really was a small community of influential writers and thinkers back then.
***In another example of the very small circles wealthy and influential people moved in, Susan Blow’s uncle, Taylor Blow, is credited with freeing Dred Scott and his family from slavery in 1857. Later, her father, Henry Blow, paid for Scott’s burial.
^^And yet today, states have made it easier and easier to be put in charge of a classroom even with no background and no formal training.
^^^Sometimes this is reported as NACWC — the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs — possibly because it later absorbed other clubs for Black women, though I wasn’t able to confirm this.